MS CLAKE IS DOING A PHD WITH LUKE KENNARD AT BIRMINGHAM UNIVERSITY, ON THE FEMINIST ABSURD IN AMERICAN AND BRITISH POETRY JENNA CLAKE I...

Wednesday, 18 September 2013

GUEST REVIEW: SIDE ON VOICU

Jeffrey Side reviews

Sky Hands

by Daniela
Voicu

Daniela
Voicu’s Sky Hands is one of those poetry collections that I am always
pleased to read, as it is neither descriptive nor literal but utilises
imprecision and generalisation. Such aspects of poetry were the norm in poetic
writing up until the early 1800s with the advent of Wordsworth and the British
Romantic poets, who introduced an emphasis on descriptiveness that became the
predominate poetic style in Western poetry until the arrival of High Modernism
in the early Twentieth Century. Sky Hands refreshingly avoids this.

The most noticeable aspects about the
collection are its use of three things: novel word juxtapositions,
idiosyncratic turns of phrase, and mixing of the concrete with the abstract. These
elements are present in almost every poem. The first of these elements, novel
word juxtapositions, is something that has a great poetic lineage.

Two of
the best exponents of it in poetry were Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, and it
can be found in Jack Kerouac’s ‘211th Chorus’: ‘quivering meat/conception’, and
in his ‘The Thrashing Doves’: ‘all the balloon of the shroud on the floor’.
And, of course, in Allen Ginsberg’s Howl: ‘hydrogen dukebox’,
‘starry/dynamo in the machinery of night’ and ‘supernatural darkness’. Other
poets who have utilised this technique are Tom Clarke in ‘You (I)’:
‘siege/engines’, John Ashbery in ‘Leaving the Atocha Station’: ‘perfect tar
grams nuclear world bank tulip’ and William Blake in Milton: ‘freezing
hunger’, and ‘eternal tables’.

The use
of this technique results in elliptical breaks between juxtapositions of words
not normally collocated and which, therefore, allows for the possibility of
expanded meaning. It operates similarly to Sergei Eisenstein’s theory of
cinematic montage where,

the emphasis is on a dynamic juxtaposition of individual shots
that calls attention to itself and forces the viewer consciously to come to
conclusions about the interplay of images while he or she is also emotionally
and psychologically affected in a less conscious way. Instead of continuity,
Eisenstein emphasized conflict and contrast, arguing for a kind of Hegelian
dialectic, where each shot was a cell and where a thesis could be juxtaposed by
an antithesis, both achieving a synthesis or significance which was not
inherent in either shot.

Another aspect of Sky Hands that is very effective
is its use of idiosyncratic turns of phrase such as: ‘depending on words hungry
for invention’ and ‘I learn the blind silence’ (in ‘You are Special’, p.18);
‘the sky is naked and the thinking of time is anchored’ (in ‘A Thought’, p.20);
‘the shy night puts her cheek on the breast of the moon’ (in ‘Glow’, p.21); ‘I
walk on the Tropic of Cancer’ (in ‘Style’, p.24); ‘water that flows from the
heaven on your skin’ (in ‘Molecular Blue’, p.26); ‘to live correctly we must be
born old’ and ‘I am lost in your crazy arms’(in ‘Cathedral of Your Love’,
p.30); and ‘Every day it is a place for another day’ (in ‘Surfing Silence’,
p.36)

The use of both novel word juxtaposition and idiosyncratic turns of
phrase enable a sort of linguistic defamiliarisation, which is always pleasing
to experience.

Voicu’s
mixing of the concrete with the abstract, is also interesting. Abstraction by
itself, of course, is no stranger to poetry. By abstraction, I mean those
phrases and image combinations that are too generalised and indeterminate to be
strictly referential. These are not to be confused with what William Empson
called “sleeping” or “subdued” metaphors but are similar to what he refers to
in Seven Types of Ambiguity as ‘ambiguity by vagueness’. An example of
abstraction can be seen in William Blake’s ‘To the Muses’ where the phrase
‘chambers of the sun’, in the first stanza, does not specifically refer to
anything. The phrase ‘chambers of the East’ in the previous line, however,
does. It refers to the cavernous areas located near the mythical Mount Ida
(represented in line one as ‘Ida’s shady brow’), the place from which the gods
watched the battles around Troy. It could also refer to the mountain in Crete
where Zeus was said to have been born. The phrase ‘chambers of the sun’ does
not allow for closure in this way. The word ‘sun’ (a source of light) has no
connection semantically with the word ‘chambers’ (a source of darkness). Also,
the sun is noted for its lack of vacuity, unlike caverns.

Voicu utilises abstractions of
this sort but also “connects” them to the referential, but in doing so the
abstractions are not weakened but paradoxically strengthened. Examples of some
of these are:

‘rhymes flow over the sunset’ (‘Sky Hands’, p.15)

‘we have hands to hold words’ (‘We’, p.12)

‘every window has a shadow of a dream’ (‘Windows Without
Dreams’, p.22)

‘my skin is filled with cries’ (‘Style’, p.24)

‘I will paint your body with love words’ (‘Remember’, p.28)

Such a conjoining of the
concrete and the abstract is to be welcomed in poetry, as, indeed, are the
other poetical aspects mentioned in this review.

Sky Hands is well worth a read. Its poems span the full range of
human emotions and will evoke in readers’ minds a myriad of interpretive
possibilities that will enrich their reading experience and transport them to a
dimension that is dreamlike in its imaginings, simple in its beauty and moving
in its honesty. What more can be asked of poetry?